


You or Your Memory

by jacksolomon73



Series: You Or Your Memory [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Cuddles, Eventual Fluff, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mollymauk Tealeaf Has Feelings, Mollymauk Tealeaf Lives, Mollymauk Tealeaf Needs a Hug, POV Caleb Widogast, POV Mollymauk Tealeaf, POV Yasha (Critical Role), Platonic Soulmates, Recovery, Resurrection, Reunions, Second Chances, Sort Of, Trauma, Yasha Needs a Hug (Critical Role), he's not really fixed, stop bringing molly back to life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 05:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26348197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacksolomon73/pseuds/jacksolomon73
Summary: The second time Mollymauk comes back to life, Yasha pulls him out of the ground unceremoniously and lays him down on the damp grass and brush on top of the hill where they'd buried him.Or: Molly is resurrected again, and it's not okay.
Relationships: Mollymauk Tealeaf & Yasha, Mollymauk Tealeaf/Caleb Widogast
Series: You Or Your Memory [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2016833
Comments: 11
Kudos: 147





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT 16/11/2020: I put Chapter 3 into a separate work (the next in the series), which meant losing all those lovely comments! But I felt it stood alone as a kind of epilogue and that these two chapters form a complete work on their own.
> 
> I also did some art for the second chapter!

The second time Mollymauk comes back to life, Yasha pulls him out of the ground unceremoniously and lays him down on the damp grass and brush on top of the hill where they'd buried him. He's pale, dirty, his hair long and tangled, his jewellery rusted and tarnished. He coughs and winces and cringes away from the light, squeezing his eyes shut. She's shaking with the exertion of the dig, panting hard, her eyes wild with the reality of what she's done and the fervour with which she had followed the summons from the stormlord. She doesn't know what she expects, but it's not this, and something about it feels terribly wrong. Molly stays like that, curled up and shaking, and she doesn't know what to do. Eventually she pulls him into a hug, and it's not the same - he goes willingly but he doesn't make a move to hug back. She can hear his breathing, rattling and stilted. Eventually she gives up and carries him to her tent where she lays him down on a bedroll. He lies there, staring at the canopy, and if she didn't see him breathing she'd think he was still dead. She falls asleep staring at him. 

That first night she wakes to the sound of him coughing, screaming with no sound, scrabbling at the sheets. His chest is heaving when she scrambles to her feet; he looks up at her, eyes finally focusing, then twists and vomits on the ground next to him, a mixture of bile and grave dirt. When he finally stops his chest is trembling with shaky breaths, head still turned to the side and eyes shut, and when she moves closer towards him he holds his hand out to stop her. He's crying, face twisted in a pitiful expression, and she's absolutely torn. She makes one aborted move towards him and then retreats, sitting back down helplessly on her bedroll. She watches him stumble out of the tent a while later, hears him throw up again, peers out to see him on hands and knees in the darkness, still as stone. 

On the second night she wakes up, finds him gone, pushes herself to a sitting position and stares out the opening in the tent. He’s stumbling around, barely able to keep upright, sometimes falling and staying there on hands and knees for a good while, spitting yet more dirt onto the ground, his arms shaking with the exertion of holding himself up. Occasionally he glances up at the moon above, and she can make out the horrible twisted expression on his face, betrayal and anger and confusion. Then he turns and spits again. She turns around and goes back to sleep.

She wakes again, later, to a rhythmic thumping and scraping sound. She stumbles out of the tent, looking around, eyes adjusting to the dark. She sees him a way off, body slumped sideways against a tree. She watches for a second, and sees his head tilt sideways and then SMACK into the side of the trunk, his right horn hitting the bark and causing a few leaves to flutter downward. She hears him tilt his head forward a little, horn scraping, and then he does it again. She runs towards him and, without thinking, shoves her hand into the spot between his head and the tree. He notices the lack of impact, turns his head, and looks up at her blearily. 

'Please don't do that, my friend' she says quietly. He doesn't respond, just pulls himself heavily to his feet and walks away. 

The third night she finds him, at the same spot as before, woken by the same sound. As she approaches she sees that his horns are now chipped, cracked, and dirty. His tarnished jewellery hangs in broken chains. He doesn't look up. 

‘Leave me alone’, he says quietly.

‘No.’

He turns around then. ‘Why do you keep bothering me!’ He snarls through clenched teeth. ‘You got what you wanted. I’m alive. Now fuck off and leave me.’ 

She walks away. It begins to rain. 

Time passes like this. She waits. She listens to him howling in the night, in the drizzle outside the tent, cursing and thrashing and screaming into the silence and indifference of the night sky with its pale moon. He spits curses in Infernal, mumbles to himself in a choked voice, and sometimes she picks up quiet sobbing, right out at the edges of her hearing. Some nights he returns to the tent, and sometimes she finds him in the morning, curled up on the ground, damp with morning dew and shivering in his thin, bloodstained shirt and trousers. She had offered him clean clothes but he wouldn't take them. Something of him is still underground, quiet and alone beneath the earth. She looks at the long pale scar running down his chest, where the glaive had sliced right through him, and feels like she's looking at something obscene, something private and not meant for mortal eyes. 

Time passes, and she's at the edge of despair, wondering whether she should try to get a message to the group, feeling woefully unequipped to deal with her friend and his terrible circumstances. She looks up, and he's lying on his bedroll, breathing slowly and deliberately, staring up at the fabric of the tent. She can feel his anger; the tension in their small space is palpable. She turns over and she must sleep, eventually. 

Sometime later she wakes to the rustling of fabric and feels a small, lean body press into hers, so tentatively. She opens her eyes in surprise and finds Molly with his back to her, in the clean white shirt and smallclothes she had brought for him, curled up into her like he's hiding from the world. He tilts his head slightly, his poor cracked horns shifting a little, and peers at her with one beady eye as if he is waiting for her reaction. Her eyes widen, and she has a split second to react, to make things normal and safe. She huffs out a little breath and pulls the blanket over both of them, carefully draping an arm over his chest, so thin and tenuously tied to this world. There's a pause, and he brings an arm up to hold hers there, fingers wrapping around her wrist. She can feel him fall asleep like that, and it feels like the most fragile thing in the world, and the most miraculous. They stay like that, huddled together in the dark, as the rain continues to fall on their tent and on the nearby grave that is slowly filling with water, slowly washing away.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Little snippets of healing. Caleb and Yasha keep an eye out.

What Caleb sees is this; a thinner, paler Mollymauk, his hair grown long and curly, his horns cracked and chipped in places and free of most of his jewellery. He's wearing plain, clean clothes (probably Yasha's doing, Caleb thinks), and he's curled into himself a little, fairly distant. The others make sure not to crowd him on this first re-meeting; despite Yasha's message in advance, they all seem simultaneously excited and unsure about this familiar but entirely new presence. Caleb watches him accept hugs, smile tentatively, glance up at Yasha for reassurance occasionally. Eventually, once everyone else has fallen back a bit, Caleb steps forward, heart pounding. He has the thought that he's dreaming, and then instantly dismisses it - this is too strange and unfamiliar to be the dreams of riotous colour and noise that usually happen when he goes to sleep thinking about Molly. He steps forward, and before he can think better of it, he takes Molly's hands in his. He hopes his face is doing the right thing; he feels too self-conscious to think. The only feeling he has is; too much time has been wasted. No more wasted time.

'Mr. Mollymauk,' he says quietly.

Molly looks up at him past a curtain of hair (and how had he never noticed he was taller than Molly? He'd never felt taller before) and gives a small smile, with just a hint of fang. That's all Caleb needs.

\---------

There is the problem of the coat. Yasha has it with her, folded up faded and tattered in her bag, but the one time she holds it out to Molly he turns away, a complicated expression on his face. Things feel so fragile that she doesn't dare press the matter, and she puts it back in her bag and continues as though nothing has happened.

\---------

Molly ends up spending most nights curled up with Yasha, and only occasional nights with Caleb. Caleb doesn't mind at all, is glad that Molly is doing what he needs to do, but that doesn't stop him from getting little to no reading done of an evening, constantly glancing up towards the door. He keeps pretending of course, even sometimes writes things down (nonsense), but sometimes he looks up to see Nott staring into his soul with those lantern yellow eyes. Sometimes she raises an eyebrow. He goes back to pretending to read.

\---------

They are out on a brief shopping trip in Zadash, Yasha looking at the shelves at a pair of bracers (that will work with her current armour situation this time, goddammit), when she sees out of the corner of her eye Mollymauk holding something in his hands. She turns, and he is staring down at a beautiful overcoat, a rich, dark chocolate brown with a thick lining. He runs his hands over the fabric, then puts it back and wanders away. As soon as he is out of earshot she buys it for him, along with a small bag of thick embroidery threads and a needle.

\---------

Mollymauk begins to embroider the coat, and he only uses the white thread. On one of their quiet walks together, Yasha spies a spray of white peonies which she picks and presses in her book, letting Molly choose the page. Later as they thunder along in the cart over the potholed road under the bright sunshine, she sees him beginning to stitch the shapes of peonies in a burst of white along the back of his coat. He embroiders runes they see on cave walls, Frumpkin in his form as a raven, and endless flourishes of filigree and strange lettering. He sits by the fire in the evening whilst everyone is talking and laughing, and Yasha always has him safe in her peripheral vision, and often now he is stitching away as the noise goes on around him.

\---------

Caleb and Molly's faces are pressed together, some night on the road out under the stars. They don't kiss, they just smile softly as Caleb cards his hand through Molly's long hair. He likes it like this, he thinks, there's something feminine about it that emphasises Molly's in-between-ness, and Caleb doesn't need to analyse it further than that. He doesn't need to spend any more time puzzling over this strange person and the strange effect that he has on Caleb. He just needs to be here, listening to Molly sigh and shift next to him, and the sound of the drizzle on the tent.

\---------

Beau is telling a tall tale. She gestures wildly in the firelight, bottle in hand.

'Yeah man, and you won't fuckin' believe what this guy said next, I swear to god I could have clocked him one but I didn't because, you know, Expositor and everything, but honestly I swear he must've never taken a step out of that library before -'

There is a tiny chuckle to her right. She glances sideways.

'Asshole,' says Molly, quietly, with a smile in his voice.

To her credit, Beau only raises an eyebrow in surprise before she elbows him (gently, Caleb notices) in the arm and says 'Fuck you.'

Molly grins at the ground. Beau goes back to her story.

\---------

Caleb has trouble knowing where Molly is looking at the best of times, and now it's dark and Molly is very close to his face, so it's even more difficult. They are tucked up together in a bed in an inn just south of Alfield, and Molly's face is a lilac-grey blur in the darkness. Eventually, finally, Caleb realises that Molly is staring at his mouth. His heart rate picks up a little and he clears his throat slightly.

'Is there something you want, Mr. Mollymauk?' he says.

Molly kisses him. Caleb inhales sharply through his nose and wraps his free arm around Molly's back. It's a little clumsy, but they keep at it, and eventually draw back for air, smiling into each others mouths and rocking together a little under the covers.

\---------

Caleb notices that although Molly's new clothes are plain, just brown wool trousers and a soft white shirt, he still keeps the shirt open almost to his waist, just as before. He supposes if that's how you were used to wearing it, anything else would feel constricting. He puts the periapt back around Molly's neck, and it looks good there, resting at the top of that thick scar that no one will look at straight on.

\---------

Fjord sits down with Molly one day, and explains haltingly in his new (old) accent that Summer's Dance is now melted in a pool of lava inside a forge. He offers Molly a scimitar that he's got somewhere (off a body? Caleb doesn't want to know) and asks if it will do for now. It's quite a nice sword, actually; light, and embellished at the hilt. Molly accepts it with a genuine smile, looking Fjord in the eyes. Fjord gets flustered and makes an excuse about tending to the horses.

Molly keeps the sword at his side. He never uses it.

\---------

Until, one day, he does. They are fighting something horrible down in the tunnels beneath a village, all teeth and tongue and foul smells. Yasha is suddenly alone and bleeding in front of it as it bears down on her, and she raises the Skingorger hastily to meet it. There's a flash of lilac skin and a hiss of guttural Infernal, and the beast gurgles and begins to bleed from it's eyes. Molly ducks in front of Yasha and draws his new sword across the back of his neck, then drives the now glowing metal deep into the front of the beast. It goes down, Molly barely ducking out of the way in time, and Caleb's heart is in his throat where he stands on the other side of the cavern, the fire on his fingertips flickering out. Molly backs away, sheathing his sword. Yasha catches Caleb's eye across the room.

\---------

They are at a market, and Yasha notices Molly quietly turning something over in his hands at a nearby stall. He pays for a few things and pockets them, then links his arm with Yasha's again as they go to meet the others. That night he nudges her as she stares at Beau, and she blushes and nudges him back. She watches him follow Caleb upstairs and feels, finally, like things might be alright.

Caleb hears the door open and close behind him. He's sorting through the components he has left, making sure he has everything he needs and in the right pockets, using the long rectangle of moonlight that falls on the rough table in front of him. Molly's presence is quiet behind him, and he turns. Molly is standing there, painted in the blues and blacks of the dark room, looking warm and real and whole in his long dark coat with its endless designs in glowing white thread. His eyes are lined in silver. Caleb can't stop looking at it, the way it catches and shimmers in the moonlight. Mollymauk grins.

'Mr. Caleb,' he says. 'Come here.'

Caleb goes.


End file.
